[HN Gopher] I just want working RCS messaging
___________________________________________________________________
I just want working RCS messaging
Author : joecool1029
Score : 290 points
Date : 2025-11-19 01:41 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (wt.gd)
(TXT) w3m dump (wt.gd)
| worthless-trash wrote:
| > say "I have been using opensource tools to analyze the logs
| from this phone and think it's a failure with Jibe". Do you get
| how crazy this sounds?
|
| No sir, this isnt crazy, the problem is that we're paying for a
| service that isnt accountable for their issues.
|
| Thats crazy.
| joecool1029 wrote:
| > No sir, this isnt crazy, the problem is that we're paying for
| a service that isnt accountable for their issues.
|
| Once again there's no direct business relationship between
| Google Jibe and me. The carriers ceded monopoly control to
| Google Jibe, at that point they have effectively become a
| wholesale utility; for the US market at least. Internationally
| this may not be the case.
|
| Apple is adamant to say they don't handle running RCS and
| there's nothing to suggest in the phone logs that they do
| anything but connect to carrier, verify RCS provisioning from
| the carrier, and then try to activate on jibecloud.net and
| (mis)handle the response from it.
|
| So from my view: Jibe is a black box that customer facing Apple
| employees are not even aware exists for RCS and the only way to
| handle a device Jibe service doesn't like is to replace it or
| swap the board, since they can't troubleshoot it. I can't see
| Google's documentation and my guess is carriers only handle the
| initial provisioning to communicate to Jibe that <blank> phone
| number on <blank> IMEI/IMSI should be allowed to register
| presence on Jibe. Just like I was able to reset my phone's
| state by wiping the esims and factory resetting, Jibe should
| have such an accessible function from either the carrier's end
| or Apple's end.
|
| I actually forgot to mention in the post that I tried
| https://messages.google.com/disable-chat weeks ago on both
| numbers and then waiting days after before re-enabling. Didn't
| work, and transferring the lines to other phones after would
| activate on RCS within seconds.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Jibe has different forms, but essentially, it's software
| that's supposed to be run on your carrier's network. As a
| customer, it doesn't matter if your carrier is using the
| network-hosted version of Jibe or the cloud version, it's
| your carrier's responsibility to Make It Work.
|
| For things like SMS/MMS servers, SIP servers, and other
| carrier infrastructure, carriers still like to run this stuff
| themselves. For RCS this was also the case a decade ago, but
| then RCS died an unceremonious death when third party
| messengers ate its lunch and carriers failed spectacularly
| trying to advertise "joyn".
|
| Jibe is a black box that must follow the RCS specification.
| It's your carrier's responsibility to make that work. As long
| as Apple is following the RCS spec, they're right in saying
| it's not their problem. Your carrier should be telling Google
| to fix their shit.
| ziml77 wrote:
| > <blank> phone number on <blank> IMEI/IMSI should be allowed
| to register presence on Jibe
|
| Funny, I more or less said a few weeks ago that SIM cards do
| not guarantee freely being able to swap numbers between
| phones more than eSIMs do, because the carrier could tie the
| SIM's phone number to the IMEI in the backend either way.
| That was just kinda dismissed as a not being a real threat...
| and yet here it seems exactly what's happened for the RCS
| part of your service!
| edbaskerville wrote:
| Oh man. It's not just Apple. I've had months of RCS not working
| on GrapheneOS, and have no idea who to blame. The first time it
| stopped working, I fixed it by switching carriers (AT&T ->
| T-Mobile). Maybe I'll try switching back! Or maybe I'll switch
| back to an iPhone and give in to iMessage. :(
| Dusseldorf wrote:
| I had the same issue, with Google Fi! The only thing that
| briefly resolved it was swapping my number over to an older
| phone running stock android. Stopped working again when I
| switched back to my other phone. I just ended up turning it off
| entirely, but it irreparably broke a few group chats I was in.
| eredengrin wrote:
| It worked for me on GrapheneOS for quite a while, but a couple
| months ago things started breaking and I no longer have it
| enabled. There's an absolute behemoth of a thread discussing
| the issue, and unfortunately it's still active which I assume
| means I'm not safe to enable it again yet. If you want some
| light reading to help put yourself to sleep:
| https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/1353-using-rcs-with-google-...
| Dusseldorf wrote:
| Honestly at this point, untangling my group chat mess was
| such a headache that I'll never turn RCS on again. I need to
| have 100% confidence that my messages are received and sent,
| and Google has forever broken that trust re: RCS. I managed
| to coax most of them over to alternative platforms, but I
| can't subject my poor grandmother to that headache, so it's
| SMS/MMS going forward for me.
| Moto7451 wrote:
| My sister had an issue with RCS not working on her Samsung. It
| turned out she had a SIM card too old for AT&T to support RCS on
| it and some Samsung related software issues related to their SMS
| apps and Google's SMS apps conflicting. A fresh SIM and a couple
| software tweaks netted her RCS.
|
| I'd assume this isn't the issue here but RCS seems to be a bit
| fickle.
| paulddraper wrote:
| I'm curious about what part of RCS requires specialized
| hardware support.
| joecool1029 wrote:
| There isn't specialized hardware support. As I remember
| Samsung had their own RCS implementation with some carriers
| (T-Mobile, possibly AT&T but I'm not sure there). They sunset
| this and moved to Google Messages. Those android devices
| would report which servers they used. This of course is
| hidden from the Apple user.
|
| I was going to make the MMS section of this post about the
| 'ISIS Wallet' boondoggle that is the closest business
| parallel I can think of to RCS and actually did require
| specialized hardware support. Same 3 carriers I've been
| trying RCS with on the iPhone tried to make a mobile payment
| wallet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softcard They rebranded
| it to Softcard since the 'We support ISIS' branding aged like
| milk. Google Wallet competed and took over the assets, sort
| of like what happened with RCS.
|
| For the specialized hardware... the SIM card needed to have
| an embedded secure element that handled the keys for the
| payment system and the phone needed to support connecting to
| that secure element on the SIM card. I think these started to
| hit the market in 2010 or so, and you would have had to have
| a SIM card new enough to support it, here's a pic of the
| T-Mobile one, I had one: https://www.tmonews.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2013/08/Screen-Sh...
| oblio wrote:
| I had working RCS on Android.
|
| Turns out that random people can add you to groups, send spam and
| from what I can see you can do nothing to prevent it. I've
| disabled it.
|
| So don't fret too much about not having it.
| TavsiE9s wrote:
| Same, it got enabled for me during an iOS update, forgot about
| it and suddenly got added to groups without my knowledge or
| consent and after about 100+ spam messages during a night I
| disabled RCS. What a waste.
| z0mghii wrote:
| That's exactly why they are banning it on lineage and custom
| roms
| zeeZ wrote:
| Last time I had enabled RCS I received a flood of "DHL needs
| your address" and "Mom I have a new phone number" scams from
| the UK and the Philippines. So far I'm not aware of anything
| useful I've missed out on by not having it enabled.
| vel0city wrote:
| I had random people adding me to groups to send spam to my
| phone even before RCS.
|
| In fact, I don't think I've ever received spam through RCS, but
| I have through MMS and even more so through SMS. Looking back
| at all the spam texts I've received in the past several months,
| _every single instance_ was SMS /MMS. Not a single time of RCS.
| oblio wrote:
| For some reason Android is quite good at blocking SMS spam
| these days, except for the RCS group thing. At least for my
| specific use case, in Europe.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| RCS issue on iPhone, reminds me of an old movie qupte... "Lex,
| this is Detroit. You think the cops are gonna waste city-dollars
| on a stolen Swedish car?"
|
| https://clip.cafe/detroit-rock-city-1999/we-must-get-the-cop...
|
| Now, if iMessage was broken, apple would surely care.
| webworker wrote:
| I truly do wonder about the amount of tech debt that must be
| inside of the Messages app on MacOS and iOS. It's got to be
| massive.
|
| I also wonder what they're using (protocol) under the hood that
| lags behind other chat clients like Telegram and Signal and
| WhatsApp. It works, but I wonder how/if it'll continue to scale
| and stay competitive.
| wrs wrote:
| I was in a working RCS chat with two Android users. One of them
| switched to iOS and it's been sheer chaos ever since. The
| conversation splits and rejoins, messages randomly choose which
| copy to appear in, my view is full of little daily notes that I
| added and removed the switcher from the conversation (of course I
| didn't), old titles for the group are resurrected and then
| disappear...and the Mac client has a few of its own quirky ways
| of destroying the same chat.
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| FWIW, RCS group chat on Android being horribly broken is
| actually a feature if you have kids. I've spoken to many
| parents of girls in the 7 - 13 age group (and have two myself),
| and the amount of drama and bullying due to iMessage group
| chats is several orders of magnitude higher than what kids with
| Android experience.
|
| I actually think iMessage group chats should have a minimum age
| limit, from a kids perspective they are no different than
| Snapchat et al.
| fastball wrote:
| You think the messaging protocol itself is causing heightened
| bullying?
| immibis wrote:
| Messaging protocol features determine social aspects.
| Harder to bully someone in a group chat if there isn't a
| group chat.
| fastball wrote:
| There are dozens of ways to have a group chat. iMessage
| is not enabling this in any meaningful way.
| Zak wrote:
| There are, but if kids are using iMessage for it and not
| using other things even though they could, not having
| iMessage can serve to insulate a kid from it.
|
| Parental controls may prevent some of the kids from
| installing third-party messaging apps, or maybe they're
| just unwilling to. There are a weird number of adults in
| my social circle who I can't convince to do so, though
| I'd imagine kids to be a little more flexible.
| prmoustache wrote:
| Kids in most european countries use whatsapp even though
| they are under the minimum age.
|
| Ban an app, another appear. Ban all apps and they would
| join any of the services that provide a web frontend.
| Kids in the late 90's/early 2000 were using IRC when ICQ
| and MSN messenger didn't support group chat, usually from
| a web client before they were introduced to mirc and
| other irc clients.
|
| Bottom line: they would find a way.
| immibis wrote:
| Yes. That's _also_ part of the technical experience that
| _also_ changes the resulting social landscape. I used to
| think "what's the point of banning something if people
| can get it anyway" but after seeing how cannabis became
| hyper-commercialized in the USA, I see that both the ban
| and evasion are just part of the game. (Which nobody
| should get prison for)
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| Not the protocol, the group chat UX. iMessage gives kids
| easy access to a place where they can create groups, name
| them, invite and kick out other kids at will, and send
| messages + audio/video. It's minimally different from Snap
| or Discord - except that those actually have parental
| controls, and there is no easy way to disable iMessage
| group chats.
|
| The equivalent is simply lacking from Android due to RCS
| group chat being a broken mess.
| c0balt wrote:
| I'm surprised you seem to presume that WhatsApp, Discord
| etc. wouldn't immediately fill the gap.
|
| At least in Berlin (School and Uni) my experience was
| that WhatsApp was far more prevalent already (due to more
| mixed Android/iOS environment likely).
| projektfu wrote:
| If all the "mean girls" are on iMessage, then being on
| Android is insulating.
| mring33621 wrote:
| yes. Android is "broke broke", so the cool kids won't use
| it
|
| Src: my 12 yo daughter
| tom_alexander wrote:
| > create groups, name them, invite and kick out other
| kids at will, and send messages + audio/video.
|
| All of that has been (and still is) available on
| everyone's phones since the dawn of time except for "name
| them": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_Messaging
| _Service - create group: send an MMS
| message to whoever you want in the "group". Now you have
| a group chat. - invite people: send a new MMS
| message including all past participants and the one
| additional participant. - kick them out: Send a new
| MMS message including all past participants except for
| the person you want to remove. - send messages +
| audio/video: MMS supports all of this.
| DoctorOW wrote:
| > kick them out: Send a new MMS message including all
| past participants except for the person you want to
| remove.
|
| That's forming a new group. When I'm kicking people out
| of my group it's because I no longer want them to
| participate.
| tom_alexander wrote:
| It's the same thing. Just like how a "cash discount" is
| the same thing as a "credit card surcharge", the end
| result is the same regardless of how you word it. Simply
| stop using the first group. You can even be explicit by
| sending a message to the first group of "I'm forming a
| new group without Becky because she's a loser" or you can
| start the new group with a message "I started this new
| group without Becky because she's a loser" which has the
| added benefit of humiliating Becky as she keeps sending
| messages to a group that will not respond to her.
| carlgreene wrote:
| I don't know if you are purposefully being pedantic here,
| but they are very different things. Even as an adult who
| has been in several of these very active iMessage group
| chats with "mutual bullying", they are vastly different
| from any of the RCS/SMS groups I'm in due to some of the
| features in iMessage.
| tom_alexander wrote:
| What are those features? I've never used iMessage but my
| ultimate point is that iMessage isn't enabling bullying,
| it just happens to be the platform these kids are
| currently using. The same bullying tactics have been
| possible since long before the iPhone existed.
|
| So far semi-extrinsic provided a list of features they
| think is uniquely enabling bullying in iMessage but I've
| just established those features are actually commonly
| available to everyone, so what other features does
| iMessage have that uniquely makes it enable bullying
| compared to MMS?
| teach wrote:
| I don't have an iPhone but surely you see how the UX is
| very different between:
|
| (a) create new group minus Becky and minus all previous
| messages, plus every participant has to migrate over (b)
| "admin" kicks Becky and no one else has to do anything
| and all the history and context is retained
| tom_alexander wrote:
| > plus every participant has to migrate over
|
| I've been in plenty of MMS group chats where we've had to
| create a new group to add or remove someone (for non-
| bullying reasons) and it has always gone smoothly without
| issue. SMS/MMS apps tend to sort your list of groups by
| most recently received message, so as soon as people stop
| using the first group it will naturally decay to the
| bottom of your list where no one looks.
|
| > "admin" kicks Becky and no one else has to do anything
|
| "admin" creates a new group chat, no one else has to
| consciously do anything because they're just selecting
| the group that has the most recent messages and therefore
| is at the top of their SMS/MMS app.
|
| There is one difference here in that with SMS/MMS there
| is no "admin" so anyone can create new groups, but if
| you're going to start evicting people without buy-in from
| the group then the dissenters are just going to form
| their own groups anyway regardless of platform.
|
| > all the history and context is retained
|
| That is a fair point, you wouldn't maintain the
| history/context but how important is that for bullying?
| My ultimate point here is that fastball is correct in
| that the iMessage platform isn't enabling bullying, it is
| just the kids preferred platform. We have all been
| perfectly capable of the same bullying since long before
| the iPhone existed, and I don't think losing
| history/context when forming new groups changes that.
| decimalenough wrote:
| Have you ever actually been in an MMS group chat?
|
| MMS is the worst standard in telco and that's saying
| something. The spec is impossibly complex, so it's not
| properly supported by carriers or device manufacturers,
| and even basic cases like "send this photo" fail
| alarmingly regularly.
| joecool1029 wrote:
| Yeah, I really tried to cover a part of how it's so bad
| in my post. It's really something from a different time.
| There's a lot of the old WAP 1.0 kind of thinking where
| the carrier ran their own proxy to make the content
| consumable by the end device due to limitations at the
| time. If you don't fetch the content off the MMSC in time
| it expires. I know there's lots of RCS spam complaints,
| but the carriers ran email to MMS gateways that had abuse
| for years.
|
| Verizon had the wackiest system with their vtext service
| where it really tried to customize more than the GSM
| carriers and they ran their own web portal. When they
| phased that out a few years ago it broke picture scaling
| for pretty much all non-iphone devices on their network.
| This is another big reason I wanted working RCS because
| if I send a picture to Android users on Verizon it ends
| up scaled down.
| prmoustache wrote:
| how is that different than regular kids groups at school
| and/or in the playgrounds?
| saaaaaam wrote:
| It's more insidious, and "always on". The bullied have no
| respite from the bullies. As someone who was horribly
| bullied at school I can only imagine the horror kids face
| now. It's not the technology per se, it's the fact that
| society seems to think it's not only ok but often
| expected for kids to have smartphones and all the digital
| footprint that goes along with them.
|
| I was brought up in a household where we had very limited
| access to TV. As a teenager I thought this was terrible.
| As an adult I realise what a huge benefit it was to me. I
| am sure that the same goes for kids and smartphones and
| group chats. They are not necessary. No one is missing
| out.
| filoleg wrote:
| > The bullied have no respite from the bullies
|
| I feel like I am missing something important here.
|
| The great-grandparent comment was talking about things
| like not being invited/kicked out of group chats, not
| being spammed/harassed through the messaging protocol in
| question.
|
| Unless I am genuinely missing something important, I
| agree with the grandparent comment. How does not being
| invited to certain group chats is different from not
| being invited to "cool kids groups" at
| school/playgrounds? As in, how is it "always on"? Not
| being invited to a chat or being kicked out of a group
| chat isn't "always on".
| patja wrote:
| I have experience where my child with a working android
| phone was socially excluded by the girls with hand-me-down
| Apple products because she couldn't "text" with them. Most
| of them didn't even have working cell service, just
| iMessage over wifi.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| SMS is legitimately a trash protocol. I don't text people
| without iMessage either. Either they get signal or we
| don't communicate.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| You know this is because apple intentionally makes their
| SMS shitty right?
|
| I was able to send full fat (640x480 at the time) videos
| to people over SMS in 2008 using a flip phone. I was able
| to do group chats and share photos and all sorts of nice
| things.
|
| I could do all that in android land as well over SMS with
| other android users, before RCS.
|
| It's only when my iPhone having family members attempt to
| send me multimedia texts that things don't freaking work.
| My dad's new wife tried to send me pictures of their
| wedding and Apple reduced them to a hundred pixels
| because fuck you.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Partly yes its apples fault. Im too bought into their
| ecosystem to switch though. Either way my biggest problem
| with SMS is the 5+ second delay that I always seem to
| have. Impossible to have a conversation like that.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| SMS is shitty because it is unreliable and always has
| been because the carriers proxy it. It delivers late or
| not at all at rate beyond what is usable for anything
| important.
|
| Some of this blame can be placed on carriers but they
| don't care.
| testartr wrote:
| on Android they will just experience social exclusion
| catgirlinspace wrote:
| iPhone users can also experience this if unlucky :D
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| "Missing out because my parents are lame" is a minor social
| stigma that kids will (should!) experience in many
| situations anyways. The benefits significantly outweigh the
| drawbacks.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Minor?
|
| Friendships are importance for psychological health and
| development.
|
| When you're excluded from the primary means of
| communications with potential friends, and can never find
| out where and when they are meeting to get together, it's
| not "minor".
| Rohansi wrote:
| So you buy your kid an iPhone to be friends with green
| bubble bullies on iMessage? They're probably not the best
| potential friends anyway.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Guess what, it's also common to buy kids clothing that
| lets them fit in, a haircut that lets them fit in, and
| let them watch the movies and TV shows other kids are
| watching so they can fit in. Kids want to fit in, in
| order to make friends, and it's healthy to make that
| easier than put arbitrary obstacles in their way.
|
| And who's talking about bullies? When most of your kids'
| potential friends communicate using iMessage, it seems
| pretty presumptuous of you to say that they're _all_ "not
| the best potential friends anyways." Actually, they might
| turn out to be great friends, because people are complex,
| and their messaging preference isn't determinative of
| their entire personality, or much of it at all.
| dangus wrote:
| This seems to be a disingenuous comparison. With RCS it's
| supposed to work but it's broken, which is your "parental
| control."
|
| But I don't think either platform lets you control messaging
| group chat functionality this way. They just offer approved
| contacts and complete disable as your options to control
| messaging.
|
| I also think your "amount of drama" might be badly measured
| simply because the majority of kids in the US use iOS.
|
| 87% of teens have an iPhone.
|
| https://www.pipersandler.com/teens
| snowwrestler wrote:
| I don't think this is a messaging technology problem. So I
| don't see how broken technology should be perceived as a
| solution or silver lining.
| joshcartme wrote:
| I have an iphone, previously had an android. I had trouble with
| RCS chats and then did the "Don't have your previous device"
| part here, https://messages.google.com/disable-chat. And since
| then things have been pretty good for me.
| par wrote:
| i Have no idea what RCS is but i know i disabled it on my iphone
| because it basically always makes my phone fall back to SMS when
| i have even the slightest lapse in network connectivity.
| OptionOfT wrote:
| Have you tried a Visible Trial to see if RCS activates there?
| charcircuit wrote:
| Why bother with Google's new, shiny chat app. Why not use
| WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Discord, etc which are more neutral
| apps.
| frfl wrote:
| This isn't Google's shiny new chat app. If you take 30s to look
| up RCS you'll understand what it actually is and its intended
| purpose.
| happymellon wrote:
| Yes it is.
|
| No one gave a crap about RCS and no one was supporting it
| until Google decided that they needed a new chat app because
| they hadn't made everyone switch in a while.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| It's Google's way to openwash their new chat app into a
| "standard" where 100% of the data runs through their servers
| in the backend for every carrier they care about.
| throwawaysoxjje wrote:
| Yeah I took a look at it: Google added the encryption
| extensions a full two years before the GSMA put them into the
| standard so it feels like their new chat app. Not to mention
| that it's been around since 2007 and everyone started tailing
| about it when google started talking about it a couple years
| ago
| issafram wrote:
| I'm surprised at the other responses that you have received.
|
| RCS isn't a Google only thing. And it isn't an "app". It is
| disappointing that people don't understand that RCS is a
| great replacement for SMS/MMS.
| piva00 wrote:
| It had the potential to be a great replacement if it just
| worked(tm) like SMS/MMS (well, MMS was also quite fickle
| back in the days), given it's so brittle across devices
| even on the same OS, with little means of troubleshooting
| by end-users and even less from non-tech savvy users, it's
| kinda dead in the water.
| issafram wrote:
| Not dead in the water at all. By default, it is enabled
| for all Android phones and iPhones
| jhbjkkhhh wrote:
| Not true. My carrier only enables it when you have a
| Samsung phone. I have an iPhone, so no luck.
| TavsiE9s wrote:
| It really isn't. SMS did not support adding random mobile
| numbers to a group chat and blasting them with spam.
| Someone needs to either fix RCS properly for current day
| use-cases or it just needs to go away.
| vel0city wrote:
| > SMS did not support adding random mobile numbers to a
| group chat and blasting them with spam.
|
| MMS did, which far predates RCS.
| komali2 wrote:
| I understand what RCS is and I don't understand why it
| matters.
|
| Everything about the concept of a phone number is confusing
| to me. It's a string of digits that if someone guesses,
| they can activate the most active notification your phone
| has (ringing), at any time, no matter if you know them or
| not. Better yet, depending on your notification and MMS app
| settings, they might be able to make a dick pic appear on
| your lock screen on a whim - big spammers of this seem to
| get marked by the carriers and apps pretty quickly, but for
| a more targeted one off, still easy.
|
| As opposed to tcp/IP based chat apps that basically require
| a bilateral human-initiated handshake before someone can
| message you...
| bashkiddie wrote:
| I do receive occasional spam on WhatsApp, Telegram and
| Signal. Besides the operator spam (try our shiny new AI
| feature!)
|
| Tying and account to a phone number is a privacy
| nightmare.
|
| I guess Facebook/Meta does it for easier social graph
| extraction/profiling, while Signal tried to hand of
| verification to precent spam. But for the sake of this
| argument, we may just assume all of them are evil.
| array_key_first wrote:
| RCS is, effectively, Google only.
|
| And there is one singular app which supports RCS.
|
| In many ways, it's a regression from SMS. In that SMS is
| somewhat universal, and RCS is so specialized it's almost
| worthless.
| issafram wrote:
| It literally isn't Google only. It is enabled, by
| default, on all iPhones. Stop with the misinformation.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| It literally _is_ Google-only. The RCS backend
| theoretically could be provided by carriers, but they 've
| all chosen not to do that, so the actual service is
| provided by Google. No matter what the specification
| says, in reality it's a Google service running on
| Google's servers.
|
| To put it another way, Google can't kill SMS short of
| literally removing the app from Android because it's not
| their infrastructure, but if they shut off their RCS
| servers tomorrow, it would be dead for good. That's a
| Google-only service.
| satellitemx wrote:
| It's sad to see so many people are blinded by this. The
| current situation of RCS is just that Google saw Apple
| disguised iMessage as SMS and wanted to do the same. RCS
| is merely a vehicle for Google.
|
| They could just layer their own chat platform on top of
| Google Messages but we all saw how Google's IM business
| went along: Chat, Hangouts, Alo, Meet etc. So they
| muddied the water so deep (to a carrier level) to make it
| look like it's Apple's issue for not adopting RCS. And
| people actually fall for it.
|
| Nobody wanted RCS. Even carriers don't want to maintain
| RCS. They just use Jibe. And that's exactly what Google
| wanted. My RCS communication with friends don't even show
| up in carrier's usage. How is that ever different from
| iMessage...
|
| You know who chose to selfhost their own RCS server? Yes,
| Chinese carriers! They call it 5G Message. New ad
| delivery channel for businesses hooray! Instead of plain
| text and a link, now your campaigns can even have MENUs
| inside! I can send SMS to a Chinese number, I can send
| iMessage to a Chinese number, but I can't send RCS. Truly
| "Universal" profile.
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| Because getting my mom to use any of those would be a
| gargantuan task.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Europeans and Africans of all ages don't seem to have a
| problem with Whatsapp.
| wbobeirne wrote:
| They are not referring to a WhatsApp specific UX issue, but
| to the cognitive load of having multiple apps that you have
| to remember who to use which for, and their different
| interfaces.
| bashkiddie wrote:
| _raises hand_ I have a bunch of problems with WhatsApp.
|
| Have you tried to restore a backup? You cant, unless it is
| uploaded to google cloud. No google account, no backup.
| (including the adress book that's tied to the account,
| since you are asking, they changed restore rules recently)
|
| Have you tried denying adress book access? Whatsapp barrs
| you from starting a conversation. But there is the
| workaround with https://wa.me/+phone ...except for WhatsApp
| web
|
| Have you ever tried putting Whatsapp in an Android work
| profile? Now try to export a chat!
|
| Every once in a while a get the task to save all pictures
| of a conversation and it is usually a pain (If you think
| its easy, try again in Androids work profile).
|
| From a UX perspective I would never mourn WhatsApp
| Barrin92 wrote:
| I have sympathy with the technical and debugging plight but
| genuinely why are people still dealing with this, SMS/RCS is to
| the US what fax machines are to Japan. You can only put so much
| lipstick on a pig. Any bog standard IP based messenger has had
| none of these issues and all of the features that RCS is supposed
| to fix for a decade.
| throwawaysoxjje wrote:
| That's the best part: RCS _is_ an IP based messenger
| kevincox wrote:
| But it's still tied to your carrier. I'd really prefer to
| keep my communication disconnected from my connectivity
| provider. These should be two completely separate services
| that I can manage independently. I just want my mobile
| provider to provide internet. Full stop. Nothing else. But of
| course they want to inject themselves into as much of my life
| as possible to make themselves stickier with a nice side of
| siphoning up more data.
| Telaneo wrote:
| Imagine a world where your ISP also separately provided an
| IRC messaging service. Why would you ever use that over
| actual IRC?
|
| This is how I feel about SMS, and phone numbers too for
| that matter. They're still around for historical reasons,
| but if we started anew, I can't imagine we would build out
| that infrastructure separately from the greater internet,
| and if we would have, I can't think of a reason why.
| arcfour wrote:
| "hey bro, just download this crappy totally trustworthy app and
| add me just to talk to me and only me!" is a patently
| ridiculous thing to try and sell people on.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I don't know, WhatsApp won my local market decades ago by not
| having to pay 10 cents per message. People didn't really care
| about encrypted chats until maybe ten years ago, and even
| today millions are using Telegram for their every day
| messaging. No idea what the security situation of Vibe and
| Facebook Messenger are these days, but their numbers also
| exceed the hundreds of millions together.
| arcfour wrote:
| Nobody in the US uses these apps, and in my opinion, for
| the better.
| array_key_first wrote:
| I live in the US, how is this for the better?
|
| We're stuck with iMessage, which Apple is actively
| hostile towards non-users. Even for me, who had an
| iPhone, it was a royal pain in the ass. What do you mean
| I can't see my messages online? I need a Mac? Are you
| fucking kidding me? I'm a paying customer, why am I being
| nickled and dimed?
|
| That, and then SMS MMS. Which are so unbelievably bad
| they're basically worthless.
|
| I shouldnt have to spend 2.5 thousand dollars to get an
| acceptable messaging experience. I shouldn't. RCS isn't
| really helping, but the situation is absolutely NOT for
| the better IMO.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >is a patently ridiculous
|
| It's patently ridiculous to trust the Signal Foundation more
| than phone carriers? I wasn't aware that AT&T and T-Mobile
| are run for the benefit of humanity.
|
| Any app that implements RCS is run by gigantic corporations,
| most of which I'd argue are closer to the US government than
| even Meta, it's not obvious to me where the ridicule comes
| in.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| RCS is basically email over HTTP, wrapped in a layer of carrier
| stuff. The same way Visual Voicemail is IMAP but wrapped in a
| layer of carrier stuff.
|
| The spec also handles video calls, conference calls,
| sending/receiving money, and just about anything else a modern
| messenger does.
|
| It just lacked E2EE for the longest time, which makes sense
| when you consider that the police and secret service have their
| tendrils in the standards body that publishes the spec.
| tcfhgj wrote:
| does it handle group chats, synchronization of messages,
| identity verification (for e2ee)?
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Group chats and just about everything else messaging
| clients have supported for a decade are part of the
| Universal Profile that came out nine years ago (file
| sharing, location sharing, audio messages, etc., although
| Signal still lacks location sharing so I guess RCS is still
| ahead of the curve here). These features will not always
| fall back well to SMS/MMS, though, according to the spec:
| https://www.gsma.com/solutions-and-
| impact/technologies/netwo...
|
| Synchronisation is not part of the problem it's trying to
| solve (sending messages between devices), the same way SMS
| and MMS don't, so that's up to the apps implementing the
| protocol.
|
| E2EE has been added very recently
| (https://www.gsma.com/solutions-and-
| impact/technologies/netwo... came out a few months ago),
| and post-quantum encryption is still being developed. It
| uses standard MLS (RFC 9420) for messaging, so verification
| will have to be implemented however normal MLS
| implementations do it. I don't know if there's a
| standardised way to do it, I haven't fully read the most
| recent RCS spec yet.
|
| I oversimplified RCS somewhat, it's not just HTTP wrapped
| in carrier stuff. It's also SIP, SDP, XML, OIDC, RTP, and
| JSON wrapped in carrier stuff. Still, page 428 of the
| second link shows an example of a POST request that you can
| make after combining all of the tidbits of specification
| that came before it, and that's where the simple JSON+XML
| shine through the stack of protocols that are tasked with
| delivering it. The E2EE layer is basically just sending
| base64'd encrypted messages over that same interface.
| tcfhgj wrote:
| Apps won't be able to synchronize if the service doesn't
| support it and there is no protocol support for it?
| jeroenhd wrote:
| The protocol makes sure a message sent from one
| phone/tablet/watch makes it to the other end. If you want
| to synchronise that message between your devices, you'll
| have to build that locally.
|
| Apple, Google, and Samsung can synchronize SMS messages
| through their cloud services, so the same also goes for
| RCS. For more privacy-oriented folk, KDE Connect can also
| offer SMS messaging to the desktop by synchronising
| locally with a connected phone.
| wvh wrote:
| You're right, but between my carrier and Meta, I'd prefer to
| trust my carrier, even if it's just to know which window to
| throw a brick through. Maybe I'm being too European on this,
| but I'm not willing to hand over basic communications to
| private industry, especially companies whose entire business
| strategy is building profiles on people.
|
| I still hope for a protocol to win out that's not tied to one
| party.
| Telaneo wrote:
| Between your carrier and Meta, the choice is clear, but your
| carrier is almost certainly not a saint. Between your carrier
| and literally and open source message service, Signal being
| the obvious one, the choice is again clear.
|
| Not to mention that the choice isn't really between your
| carrier and Meta, but rather Google and Meta, since most
| people on Android end up just using Google servers for RCS,
| and that choice is much more of a toss-up.
| smelendez wrote:
| I don't fully get what he thinks the issue is and how it relates
| to Google Jibe (which apparently is the RCS-as-a-service platform
| the US carriers use).
|
| Has Jibe somehow blacklisted his phone? In that case, Apple might
| technically be right -- it's a carrier issue, but with all major
| carriers, since he says they're all using Jibe on the backend.
|
| Anyway, I doubt he'd sound crazy, as he puts it, to the Apple
| Store people making this case. They might even be sympathetic,
| but this is probably the best he'll get, since Apple's whole
| protocol is to get you on one centrally preauthorized track or
| another to having a working phone.
| joecool1029 wrote:
| >Has Jibe somehow blacklisted his phone? In that case, Apple
| might technically be right -- it's a carrier issue, but with
| all major carriers, since he says they're all using Jibe on the
| backend.
|
| That's my guess, yeah. The only unrelated carrier I haven't
| tried yet is Boost/DISH. I can hop networks on US Mobile but I
| don't think it'll help. So far I've tried 3 T-Mobile lines on
| this phone, the US Mobile line on AT&T's network, and my mom's
| Verizon Wireless line.
|
| > Anyway, I doubt he'd sound crazy, as he puts it, to the Apple
| Store people making this case.
|
| It's difficult: I probably should have had a write-up before
| going in, my list in the blog is not complete of steps I tried
| to get this going. Understand though that all the user facing
| and employee facing documentation says if it's RCS it must be
| the carrier.
|
| Had an awesome senior support agent a few calls ago that knew
| what he was talking about. Actually described previous issues
| where RCS would not activate early in iOS 26 with a single sim
| user that had an inactive but not deleted eSIM. I believe the
| store also repeated a similar mention today.
|
| The senior support agent on the phone just hadn't gotten to the
| point of fully ruling out an on-phone software state issue.
| What I mean is I restored a backup from iTunes that their
| diagnostics reported as incompletely restored. So after our
| call he wanted me to either try that again or do an iCloud
| backup. I did the latter, since it seemed to be described as a
| different restore process that's less likely to copy back a
| broken state to the device.
| jjtech wrote:
| Jibe actually will ask iOS for App Attest attestation (this is
| actually spec, unfortunately: see section 2.11 Client
| Authenticity in RCC.14)
|
| So it is entirely plausible that they banned the device, I
| guess. (Or they could have banned the IMEI, as mentioned)
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| It looks like they're using US Mobile (which resells T-Mobile as
| "Death Star"). IIRC US Mobile has some big gaps, I wouldn't be
| surprised if RCS if one of them. With their rebadged Verizon
| service you don't even get Visual Voicemail
| joecool1029 wrote:
| T-Maybe is T-Mobile postpaid, had it since 2014 or so. Death
| Star is US Mobile AT&T network they brand as Darkstar.
| ddalcino wrote:
| That's what I thought too. The author appears to have tried
| every obvious debugging step, except for switching away from US
| Mobile.
|
| I've been using US Mobile myself for a little over a year, and
| I remember a period of about 2-3 months where most carriers had
| implemented RCS for iOS on their services, but US Mobile had
| not, so I couldn't use RCS for a while. I don't know what they
| had to implement to get RCS working on iOS, but it's possible
| that their implementation does not work with iOS 26.
| INTPenis wrote:
| Most of my friends here in Sweden use Signal. But on the rare
| occasions that we had to switch back to messages lately, for
| example when Signal was down, I noticed RCS has been working
| flawlessly.
|
| It's quite the nice surprise because it's a technology you heard
| about years ago and now suddenly it crops up in daily life. We
| all gave up on it years ago too and used other IM apps like
| Signal, Briar or SimpleX.
| garbagewoman wrote:
| Rcs existed years ago?
| Jtsummers wrote:
| It was originally started in 2007 and first deployments
| started rolling out around 2012. The US carriers were just
| spectacularly bad at implementing it, so Google swooped in
| and did it themselves. Then they extended it in non-standard
| ways and added E2EE. Good, but not standard so also not as
| helpful as it sounds because if your conversation partners
| aren't (or weren't, maybe it's better now?) using Google's
| implementation then your conversations were sent in the
| clear, just like MMS and SMS before it.
| cweagans wrote:
| Yes?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services
| immibis wrote:
| FWIW SimpleX is owned by some not very good people.
| INTPenis wrote:
| Explain.
| immibis wrote:
| https://xcancel.com/epoberezkin
| ranger_danger wrote:
| What are we supposed to be outraged by here exactly?
| SanjayMehta wrote:
| I've seen this same behaviour with IOS messaging ten years ago; I
| would travel between countries with roaming enabled and every
| time I changed countries and turned on my iPhone, iMessage would
| be waiting for activation.
|
| Once spent 5 hours on the phone with an iMessage developer in
| Ireland helping them debug the issue.
|
| At that time, we didn't have eSIM so I ended up with an Android
| phone for roaming and my iPhone for home country.
|
| Many months later I got an update from Apple. It was something to
| do with activation. iOS used to send a hidden SMS to a server in
| the UK and sometimes while roaming it would time out.
| SamDc73 wrote:
| It's weird to me when Google market RCS as universal protocol
| when it doesn't work on Android devices without Google services.
|
| (I use GraphenOS and couldn't make it work for the life of me)
| joecool1029 wrote:
| Wait til you find out Google Voice still doesn't support RCS.
| (To be fair bandwidth.com runs the service under it and it
| feels like a product Google wanted to get rid of but was stuck
| with)
| jeroenhd wrote:
| The RCS protocol is universal. Carrier RCS support is minimal,
| though, and third-party RCS support was never part of the spec
| and essentially unimplemented.
|
| Google had to pretend to be everyone's carrier to make RCS work
| because the GSMA spec assumed everyone would download/install
| their carriers' messenger apps to use RCS, like you would back
| in the day with SMS/MMS. This expectation was broken the day
| Google allowed app developers to write third-party SMS apps,
| but that hasn't bothered the spec people so far.
| Telaneo wrote:
| > GSMA spec assumed everyone would download/install their
| carriers' messenger apps to use RCS
|
| Who in their right mind would make this assumption? I'd hate
| to have to explain that one to grandma.
| codedokode wrote:
| If you have to install an app, you can just install Signal
| or Element, and not bother with RCS.
| Telaneo wrote:
| Exactly!
| SamDc73 wrote:
| My current contacts (out of ~120) only ~20 are on signal
| ..
|
| So unfortunately SMS will still be around for quite some
| time
|
| now RCS compared to SMS is a bit more secure (in theory
| at least), so would rather over plain SMS but never over
| signal
| Telaneo wrote:
| If Grandma had to install a seperate app to use RCS, she
| too would probably end up using Signal, since the barrier
| to entry is the same.
|
| The reason iMessage is popular in the US is the fact that
| it's functionally just SMS, being used by the default
| message app. The reason that didn't happen in Europe is
| that SMS used to cost money to send, so nobody was
| already deeply invested in that system, but instead
| rushed to Whatsapp et al., since those were free and SMS
| was not. SMSes are free nowadays, but by now we're all
| already invested, and all the apps provide a better
| experience than SMS and RCS (the former due to lack of
| features, the latter because its often broken) and even
| Grandma has Whatsapp to keep in touch with family, if
| only because little Timmy installed it.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| When RCS was designed, carriers still programmed most of
| the phones, and if not, provisioning SMS messages would
| program generic vendor implementations on the phones.
| That's essentially what RCS still does, except now we have
| phone operating systems that let users freely install
| system applications.
|
| The iPhone was unique in that it refused to let carriers
| customize its operating system. That's part of why Apple
| had to partner with a relatively obscure carrier on launch,
| while Motorola/Samsung/Nokia/Sony Ericsson/Android phones
| launched on random carriers all the time.
|
| Many people still buy phones from their carriers which
| comes with all kinds of apps pre-installed, including
| carrier-branded SMS apps in many cases.
|
| Everyone in their right mind would have made that
| assumption when the system was designed. Only some weirdoes
| at Apple and a few hard-core open source enthusiasts cared.
|
| Of course, that doesn't mean that operating system vendors
| such as Apple and Google can't simply implement RCS and all
| the weird carrier quirks they need to deal with in their
| own apps anyway, and to make messaging available using an
| API. They already do that kind of stuff with SMS, MMS,
| location information, internet connectivity, and
| practically anything else the phone does. They just decided
| that they're not really gonna bother with an API for this
| specific trick your phone can do.
| Telaneo wrote:
| > When RCS was designed, carriers still programmed most
| of the phones
|
| The past truly is a foreign country.
|
| > Many people still buy phones from their carriers which
| comes with all kinds of apps pre-installed, including
| carrier-branded SMS apps in many cases.
|
| You're joking, right? I've never seen this in Europe
| since the flip phone days. I thought we had left that in
| the past. Most people here buy their phones outright, but
| even when on a plan, they don't fill your phone with
| malware.
| xeromal wrote:
| I'm pretty sure the person you're responding to is
| talking about the flip phone era pre-iphone. Think Treo
| 650 / Blackjack era.
| array_key_first wrote:
| Nope, if you go out and buy a cheapish android phone from
| a carrier in the US today, it will have a ton of shit
| preinstalled that is carrier specific. Including
| sometimes messages, visual voicemail, etc.
|
| Apple has basically had the balls to tell carriers to go
| fuck themselves and do it their way, and it's been a huge
| boon. Google still hasn't done this enough, IMO.
| xeromal wrote:
| The context I was talking about how when RCS was
| designed, carriers still were mostly responsible for
| "apps" on the phones.
| yellowapple wrote:
| RCS has been a royal pain for me on Android, too. Partially my
| fault since I'm using non-default ROMs (LineageOS on my Fairphone
| 4, which I then replaced with GrapheneOS on my Pixel 9a), but
| also mostly Google's fault for taking as janky of an approach as
| possible when it comes to its Messages app (which seems to be the
| only actively-maintained Android SMS app with RCS support,
| because of course it is).
|
| The Graphene folks have at least been making progress on getting
| it working (my understanding is that Messages expects special
| permissions from Android and Play Services that GrapheneOS has to
| specifically whitelist without blowing massive holes in the
| Google Play sandbox, and without those permissions it fails to
| verify the phone number for certain carriers -- T-Mobile
| included, in my case). Hopefully whatever fix they come up with
| works for the long haul; it was really annoying to have RCS
| working fine for all of two weeks only for it to immediately
| start failing again when the required RCS endpoint switched from
| Google's Jibe instance to whatever T-Mobile is allegedly
| maintaining themselves.
| Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote:
| To be fair this is a north america problem.
|
| The rest of the world is on WhatsApp and doesn't even know what
| RCS messaging is.
|
| But here in North America,we like pain.
| seany wrote:
| Are there reasonable foss WhatsApp clients?
| YellowTech wrote:
| Not that a Meta product is a perfect solution either
| zdragnar wrote:
| Early adopter syndrome strikes again. None of my friends or
| family have Whatsapp, Whatsapp doesn't (currently) work with
| other services, and all of us have had SMS for nearly as long
| as we have had cell phones.
|
| Slow cable Internet and 120v residential electricity are two
| more examples. I fortunately have fiber now, but I'll be
| stuck dreaming of 240v outlets and appliances for the rest of
| my life.
| bombela wrote:
| Ovens, induction cooking, electric car charging, dryer etc
| is already 240V at high amperage. With a dedicated circuit.
|
| EU also mandates dedicated circuits for big appliances, so
| there is no difference in practice.
|
| The two things I can think of are electric kettle and a
| raclette machine.
|
| Tools are mostly battery powered those days. A home
| workshop would most likely be wired in 240 or three phases
| anyways.
|
| What else are you missing?
| zdragnar wrote:
| Alas, my workshop didn't come with 240 already run, so
| that was an added expense to get my welder set up.
|
| An electric tea kettle that didn't take an hour to warm
| up would be very nice.
|
| My well pump runs on 120v, and when the motor kicks in
| the whole house knows.
|
| 240v has lower voltage drop over distances, puts off less
| heat due to lower amperage for the same wattage, and
| since we're dreaming, we could switch over to a sane plug
| design like Type F or G instead of A and B.
| tredre3 wrote:
| > An electric tea kettle that didn't take an hour to warm
| up would be very nice.
|
| I've been using electric kettles in north america and
| whilst they take longer, we're talking 5 minutes not an
| hour.
|
| Some hyperbole can be appropriate but you're just being
| disingenuous here, or you've never actually used a
| kettle.
| rxyz wrote:
| I don't believe early adoption applies to SMS. In a lot of
| Europe people just migrated from SMS to other services
| around 2010 because it worked better
| Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote:
| Yeah but sms just doesn't support modern messaging (rcs
| probably does).
|
| Very poor quality for images and videos, emoji reactions,
| editable messages, deletable messages, group
| administration.
| vel0city wrote:
| You've got 240V in your panel. You can make any outlet in
| your home a 240V outlet if you want.
| yellowapple wrote:
| That's a great way to warm up your house if the wires
| between the panel and the outlet ain't rated for the
| higher amperage ;)
| vel0city wrote:
| Running the same wattage device at 240V instead of 120V
| would _decrease_ the amperage, assuming the device was
| designed to handle either voltage.
|
| My desktop PC uses about 600W running at full tilt. It
| can take 120V or 240V. At 120V, it will pull 5A to run
| its 600W load. At 240V, it'll only use 2.5A. This means
| for the same gauge of wire, it'll experience less
| resistive losses and thus be cooler and less prone to
| overheating.
|
| You wouldn't change the outlet to a higher amperage
| outlet, you'd just change to the 240V equivalent of that
| same amperage rating. For the US, it looks pretty much
| the same as a regular wall outlet but has the blades
| horizontal instead of vertical. Something like this:
|
| https://www.homedepot.com/p/Leviton-15-Amp-250-V-NEMA-6-1
| 5R-...
| knollimar wrote:
| Theres some argument they might be 208 (75% power for
| resistive heat), rennovations for apartments suck, etc.
| freddie_mercury wrote:
| The rest of the world isn't on WhatsApp. What a bizarre
| claim. Vietnam uses Zalo. Japan uses Line. Korea uses
| Kakaotalk. China uses WeChat. Iran is Telegram.
|
| And in the US more people are using iMessage than SMS thanks
| to iPhone's 58% market share.
| lawgimenez wrote:
| The other countries not mentioned are on Facebook's
| Messenger.
| piva00 wrote:
| I think Germany has a high amount of users on Signal,
| it's quite interesting seeing the stats about messaging
| apps in different countries, it's very fractured
| internationally while being very consistent inside
| borders.
|
| I for one fucking hate that most of Sweden uses FB
| Messenger, it's the clunkiest of them all, and since I
| don't like using it all I constantly miss important
| messages from friends from not having the app installed
| and checking Facebook once in a blue moon :/
| reddalo wrote:
| >it's very fractured internationally while being very
| consistent inside borders
|
| I think it's caused by the network effect [1].
|
| >I for one fucking hate that most of Sweden uses FB
| Messenger
|
| I agree. Denmark is the same, everybody uses FB Messenger
| or, even worse, Snapchat.
|
| And don't even get me started on payment systems: Sweden
| has Swish, Denmark has MobilePay, Italy has Satispay,
| etc. It's completely fractured and it's so annyoing when
| travelling across the EU.
|
| At least there's a new European system called Wero [2], I
| wonder if it's going to help fixing this situation.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect
|
| [2] https://wero-wallet.eu/
| karel-3d wrote:
| That's not dominant anywhere right now. Facebook now
| somehow merged it back to the main app... again.
| veeti wrote:
| Check India and Indonesia next, there's quite a lot of WA
| users for you.
| mmmlinux wrote:
| always has been. some countries used AIM, Others Yahoo
| messenger, others MSN.
| hurricanepootis wrote:
| > Iran is Telegram
|
| I don't know about you, but I personally talk with Iranians
| more on Whatsapp than telegram. I know the Iranian
| government did ban whatsapp for a while, but its still
| popular. I remember reading an article on here about a
| whatsapp leak, and it mentioned that there are over 60
| million whatsapp users in Iran. Considering that Iran has a
| population of around 91 million, that's a huge majority of
| the country.
| y-c-o-m-b wrote:
| Can confirm, my family back in Iran doesn't use Telegram
| and haven't for quite some time. They're all on WhatsApp.
| Telegram seemed to be popular in Iran during the Whatsapp
| ban and it switched back to Whatsapp being dominant it
| seems. Which is very annoying to me because I loathe Meta
| and don't use any of their products.
| hurricanepootis wrote:
| If only Signal wasn't blocked/banned in Iran without a
| proxy...
| Cloudef wrote:
| I remember installing WhatsApp and it proceeded to delete all
| contacts from my phone. Haven't ever installed WhatsApp ever
| since. Have told people to either contact me through e-mail,
| google chat, LINE, discord or irc after that incident.
| lloeki wrote:
| > The rest of the world is on WhatsApp and doesn't even know
| what RCS messaging is.
|
| Absolutely _not_ the case here (France), the overwhelming
| default is SMS (and now RCS). Sure people use WhatsApp but
| also Telegram just as much these days, but in both cases it's
| _not the default_.
|
| Maybe because it's been, I don't know, one to two decades
| that SMS have been unlimited in even the most basic plans.
|
| Also RCS Just Works here, I've seen my non-Apple contacts
| move to RCS over time as they got OS or phone upgrades.
|
| I'd blame NA carriers, which, from afar, seem to have a habit
| of screwing up in so many ways.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I refuse to use Google's builtin messenger so RCS
| definitely won't "Just Work" with me...
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| I guess it depends on each other's bubble. In France my
| perception is that most messaging is on Whatsapp. Not that
| I'm happy about that...
| benrutter wrote:
| I don't know- I'm in England whastapp is the default and it
| makes me sad.
|
| I was hoping when I first learnt about RCS that it could be
| an alternative to Meta owning everyone's comminications
| channels, but I've given up that hope a fair while ago.
| tauntz wrote:
| > The rest of the world is on WhatsApp
|
| That's not true at all. Random data point. Estonia. I have a
| _single_ contact that uses WhatsApp. Everybody else is
| reachable via FB Messenger/Discord/SMS/Signal/Google
| Chat/Instagram.
| jaffa2 wrote:
| Can you not just sms your contacts? Why everything have to
| be an app?
| Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote:
| Last time I checked the usage percentage of whatsapp was
| extremely high in the whole world.
|
| China is always an exception,but they are locked partially
| out of the whole internet
| bashkiddie wrote:
| I have WeChat and WhatsApp. From a user perspective they
| do not differ much.
|
| There is a rumor when both companies tried to enter the
| Indian market: Whatsapp won.
|
| WeChat assumes there is good reception and fast data
| transfer anywhere so there is no need to compress
| pictures and videos.
|
| Whatsapp could be passed as Android APK between phones.
| And it resizes and recompresses every picture you send.
|
| So thats my guess why WhatsApp won 1/6 of the planets
| pooulation in India.
| binkHN wrote:
| The fact that the "rest of the world" is using a messaging
| app that's owned by one company is ridiculous.
| Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote:
| Unfortunately on the web it's like this for almost
| everything, messaging is no different.
| binkHN wrote:
| I can use email from multiple providers without issue and
| it interoperates nicely with anyone else who has an email
| address.
| Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote:
| I'm not saying it's 100% that way, but a large chunk
| works like that. Videoconference, chat, collaborative
| document editing are pretty much centralized in the hands
| of private companies, even if open source solutions do
| exist.
|
| SMS also has crazy weird limitations with messaging
| across countries due to ISP pricing, even though the
| messaging apps such as whatsapp have no problem with
| this.
| binkHN wrote:
| > SMS also has crazy weird limitations with messaging
| across countries due to ISP pricing
|
| Yeah, the carriers shot themselves in the foot here
| trying to monetize this and they opened the flood gates
| for replacements to come to fruition.
| chrismorgan wrote:
| No, in India RCS is a thing. It's popular as an spam
| distribution channel and nothing else, so people may learn
| just enough about it to turn it off.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| One issue with Google's RCS implementation is that they've
| added root detection, something mandatory if you follow the RCS
| payments spec. Google will probably eventually want to mirror
| Apple's "send money*" feature to their messenger which
| precludes GrapheneOS and other non-official software (including
| Google's GSI images).
|
| *: unless someone does a chargeback after, which makes the
| money disappear from your account, a major source of "oops I
| accidentally sent (too much) money (to the wrong person)" scams
| yellowapple wrote:
| Yeah, that root detection is the bane of my existence, beyond
| just RCS. Even entirely ignoring my phone having much
| stronger security than with the stock OS (and therefore
| rendering the whole "security" excuse to be complete BS), if
| I want to take on the risk of using an "insecure" device for
| payments or whatever then that's my choice to make and mine
| alone.
| ChadNauseam wrote:
| Your credit card probably has a policy where they take on
| the liability for fraud. At least in that case, you're not
| the one primarily taking on the risk for using an insecure
| device
| floppyd wrote:
| The year is 2076. An independent panel of experts has finally
| confirmed Sam Altman achieved AGI, for real this time. Quantum
| computers are factorizing numbers left and right. Cold nuclear
| fusion got so cold that we have to warm it up a little. Americans
| are still trying to communicate over something called "SMS", a
| text message protocol from 1993, but nobody knows why.
| bergfest wrote:
| A task force of former nuclear fusion scientists has been
| established to fix bluetooth audio quality for once and
| forever.
| f1shy wrote:
| Come on! Get real!
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Invalidate every patent that is older than the maximum
| lifetime allowed by law, and you'll see it magically fix
| itself up.
| captainkrtek wrote:
| IPv6 is almost fully adopted, for reals
| jofzar wrote:
| Woah let's calm down, we were talking about the future not
| some future sci-fi fantasy land.
| binkHN wrote:
| I actually took this to heart and deployed it natively on
| multiple VLANs in my home. Then, even with the abundance of
| address space, Comcast pulled the ability to use IPv6 in this
| manner and I'm back to to using NAT on all my VLANs except
| for one. Progress.
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| > _Comcast pulled the ability to use IPv6 in this manner_
|
| Can you expand on this?
|
| It's been a while since I've explored IPv6, but I'm on
| Comcast and I recently switched from OpenWRT to an Ubiquiti
| router and was surprised that 1) it doesn't enable IPv6 by
| default and 2) It asks for configuration [2] that I'm not
| sure how to answer. I thought everything "just worked" with
| Router Advertisement.
|
| [2] https://help.ui.com/hc/en-
| us/articles/115005868927-UniFi-Gat...
| binkHN wrote:
| In a nutshell, Comcast used to provide a /60 to
| residential customers and this could be subnetted into
| more than one LAN. Nowadays they only provide a single
| /64 and this can only be used for one subnet.
| ianburrell wrote:
| It sounds like your router can request a larger prefix
| length than /64 and Comcast will give up to a /60. That
| requires a router that knows how to do that.
|
| That seems like reasonable approach when most people just
| need /64, and those who want more have to configure to
| get it.
| binkHN wrote:
| Comcast USED to give up a /60 when requested; they now
| ignore the request and provide a /64.
| testartr wrote:
| the problem with SMS is not the year it was made. TCP is much
| older
| ronsor wrote:
| Every time the "backwards Americans are still using SMS!" snark
| comes up:
|
| * SMS is cheaper in America than in Europe where carriers gouge
| their customers for it.
|
| * Usually this means the non-Americans are just using WhatsApp
| (owned by Meta/Zuckerberg) instead, which is hardly something
| to be proud of.
| calyhre wrote:
| I don't know a lot about the rest of Europe on this, but here
| in France it's been more than a decade SMS are unlimited in
| mobile plans, and these plans are quite cheap.
|
| We also have free roaming in the whole Europe.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| Whatsapp came out 16 years ago. Yes, the main driver for
| adoption was avoiding fees. They still emphasize it being
| free to this day.
|
| The adoption of messaging apps caused a lot of carriers to
| reduce or eliminate the SMS fees, as they saw the business
| was evaporating.
| jorvi wrote:
| Carriers actually massively jacked up SMS fees, just not
| for consumers.
|
| One of Signal's main cost centers is activation SMS
| messages. For many other small players it is a
| significant factor too.
| nixosbestos wrote:
| Finding and eating roadkill is cheap too, free even. Free
| protein in this year? Yeah, I'd rather do that than use
| fucking SMS for anything.
| throw83947y wrote:
| Dogs eat roadkill and poop. Dogs are very popular. You may
| have a point!
| Zak wrote:
| Ignoring _pride_ , WhatsApp has major advantages over
| SMS/MMS, including high-quality media, group chats that
| actually work, free international messaging, video calls, and
| (unless they're lying) encryption.
|
| I would be pleased if everyone who uses SMS with me switched
| to WhatsApp. I would be more pleased if they switched to
| Signal, but the UX benefits of either one are significant.
| looperhacks wrote:
| Man, I remember a few years ago when I was in a place without
| good Internet reception, but good enough phone reception. Wanted
| to send a SMS instead of a WhatsApp message and only noticed
| hours later that my phone switched to RCS without fallback and my
| "SMS" didn't go out because of the missing internet connection.
|
| I disabled RCS that day and never enabled it again.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| 2G and 3G networks are dying. 4G+ is entirely packet based.
| "Phone reception without internet reception" simply isn't a
| thing once the final analogue networks die out. That's what RCS
| is built for.
|
| RCS has the advantage of theoretically being able to get
| priority through the baseband, but if you're using Google's RCS
| servers rather than your carrier's, that's not going to work.
| tcfhgj wrote:
| > RCS has the advantage of theoretically being able to get
| priority through the baseband, but if you're using Google's
| RCS servers rather than your carrier's, that's not going to
| work.
|
| sounds like a violation of net neutrality
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Phone calls also can get priority over plain SIP traffic
| and SMS messages get transmitted on mobile networks before
| 3G connections are established to send Teams messages. I
| don't think net neutrality laws covers carrier network
| functionality like this.
|
| I'm not a lawyer, though, so who knows.
| tcfhgj wrote:
| > and SMS messages get transmitted on mobile networks
| before 3G connections are established to send Teams
| messages.
|
| this is different as you already explained
|
| Net neutrality:
|
| > Net neutrality is the principle that internet service
| providers (ISPs) treat all online traffic equally and
| openly, without discrimination, blocking, throttling or
| prioritisation.
|
| https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/glossary/open-
| int...
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I know what net neutrality is. I just doubt it applies to
| RCS. Packet switched versus circuit switched transmission
| of digital messages is just an implementation detail.
|
| With the introduction of LTE, everything from calls to
| texts have been IP based TCP/UDP/maybe SCTP packets. Does
| WhatsApp get to file a net neutrality violation because
| the phone's native SIP client gets priority by the
| modem/carrier? Does Gmail get to file a claim because SMS
| messages exchanged through SIP are delivered faster than
| their push notifications? Does Telegram get to file a
| claim because you have to pay for a megabyte of roaming
| costs traveling abroad while you only pay for a single
| "SMS" despite both being a TCP packet? I don't know. I
| don't expect those claims to apply.
|
| RCS is the same, in that it's a core carrier feature that
| communicates between your phone's messaging service and
| your carrier's infrastructure. RCS' envelope is actually
| quite similar to MMS' design, except MMS' data
| transmission still had to be implemented in a circuit-
| switched way because it came from the 3G era.
|
| Google muddied the water by offering carrier
| infrastructure (an RCS server) worldwide to any phone
| that wants to connect to it. It's as if I would host my
| own SMSC I'd let anyone in the world connect to. It's not
| the normal use case and as carriers are implementing
| their own RCS services, I expect this anomaly to slowly
| disappear over time.
|
| The distinction between third party messengers and
| SMS/MMS/RCS is a good thing, in my opinion. SMS/MMS/RCS
| providers need to be able to exchange what is essentially
| a live feed on a phone number with law enforcement at a
| moment's notice. Messengers like Signal don't. If third
| party services would fall under the same category as RCS,
| it'd stand to reason that the same would also apply in
| terms of law enforcement orders, and I don't think anyone
| but the law enforcement agencies would want that.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| IMS traffic (voice & conventional SMS) runs on a different
| PDP context or "bearer" (think "VLAN" but on the cellular
| interface) which is prioritized at the network level over
| the general-purpose internet access bearer. I assume that
| if RCS is offered by the carrier then it would also be
| running over a dedicated bearer.
| array_key_first wrote:
| No, RCS is 'built for' a cheap and thinly vieled attempt for
| carriers to retain some control over messaging. Oh, and for
| mass surveillance purposes.
|
| It's not a coincidence that RCS still requires carrier
| hardware and coordination, despite being an IP messaging
| protocol. It's also not a coincidence that the protocol did
| not feature E2EE, despite even student project protocols
| providing that.
| tamimio wrote:
| I can almost guarantee that the issue is a carrier issue, I use
| RCS on an iphone and it works out of the box, and I have all the
| things you listed for troubleshooting.
| jjice wrote:
| +1 for this being my experience. Used RCS on a Pixel 6a and a
| Pixel 8 before switching to an iPhone. As soon as my carrier
| got approved by Apple (or whatever the hell that process was),
| RCS just worked out of the box with my (increasingly few)
| Android friends. I was actually surprised by how smooth it was,
| once it was actually available from Apple.
| imp0cat wrote:
| On Android, RCS always seems to work great until it suddenly
| doesn't.
| immibis wrote:
| Thanks RCS for showcasing why design by committee doesn't work,
| and why dumb packet-switched networks won.
| nextstep wrote:
| Just use Signal
| joecool1029 wrote:
| It's fine for ephemeral chats. But one of the pissoffs of
| restoring the phone is losing all of my signal messages each
| time. I threw it on Android device today since it was getting
| annoying explaining to my active signal contacts each time my
| identity changed and I will have at least another restore ahead
| of me still.
| hurricanepootis wrote:
| I've switched devices and had my Signal history and identity
| carry over. Signal does do chat backups.
| joecool1029 wrote:
| I think you need the old device in hand to do it. If you
| wipe the device and restore from a backup, there's no way
| to transfer the history. There's some new cloud backup
| feature in Signal Android Beta, but this wouldn't help on
| an iPhone.
| Zak wrote:
| There's an option for a password-protected backup to the
| local filesystem. Of course you need to copy that backup
| to somewhere else if you want to be able to restore it
| without the old phone.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Signal's sub-par desktop app and "you can't restore more than
| five days of history and if you want more you're wrong"
| approach, together with the complete inability to use the
| normal app on more than one device (phone + tablet, for
| instance), makes for a pretty terrible user experience.
|
| The protocol and the service behind it are state-of-the-art,
| but it's a tough sell if you're coming from something that just
| works on every device, like iMessage or WhatsApp.
| bashkiddie wrote:
| I do not understand why your comment got downvoted:
|
| I do receive spam in Signal, because i had to register a
| phone number.
|
| I loose my chat history if I do not log into the desktop
| client for FIXNUM days.
|
| The desktop client may crash as soon as you kill its
| supporting terminal.
|
| I have tried the user name feature once and signal reported,
| that they had lost my username, I would need to create a new
| one.
|
| I have not tried backup and restore. So far I am not in the
| mood for a potential failure.
| derbOac wrote:
| That or something like Matrix, although I use Signal myself.
|
| This thread was depressing to me -- I can't believe we're still
| dealing with the lack of a truly open near universally used
| secure messaging system.
| joecool1029 wrote:
| > That or something like Matrix, although I use Signal
| myself.
|
| I bridge signal to matrix on my homeserver using signal-
| mautrix: https://github.com/mautrix/signal
|
| This allows me to use different phones without going through
| transfer/wipe. Still needs a primary device though, which was
| the iPhone until yesterday.
| Groxx wrote:
| Yeah... I just started getting back into building sms/mms/rcs
| apps on Android and oh boy. It's much more of a mess than I
| expected, and much more "oh so it's basically just Google now,
| and they seem to be trying to lock it down further" than I
| expected (or hoped).
|
| And you can't even implement it yourself because it requires
| special permissions on Android, which you can only get if you're
| a carrier/oem-blessed app. And the early "you'll be able to build
| other apps, there will be an API like this:
| https://github.com/android-rcs/rcsjta" promises (which would put
| it on par with sms/mms) never materialized, despite a reference
| implementation that did exactly that over a decade ago.
|
| At this point I'm just totally against RCS and I'm intentionally
| turning it off. Why hand _all_ of your messaging communications
| over to Google, when they 've got such a consistent history of
| being hostile? We're much better off going back to telling people
| not to use sms (or mms or rcs) at all because it's insecure.
| ljlolel wrote:
| Then in practice it's just Whatsapp owned by Meta
| mfru wrote:
| Signal exists.
|
| Whoever knows how to download WhatsApp, knows how to download
| Signal.
| atoav wrote:
| Our IT department has found a way. Want to get some
| credentials sent to you (usually just for new accounts)?
| They send it only via Signal as a out of band method.
|
| This turned Signal into the defacto default in our org.
| gsa wrote:
| Signal does some things well, but lacks far behind other
| apps in UX. It doesn't do cloud backups either, which keeps
| me from recommending it to less technical folks.
| andrepd wrote:
| > It doesn't do cloud backups either,
|
| Yes it does.
| abraham wrote:
| Signal recently introduced cloud backups.
| https://signal.org/blog/introducing-secure-backups/
| gsa wrote:
| Looks like the needle has moved, but reading the blog
| it's a recent development and only available in the beta
| version of the Android app.
| abraham wrote:
| They've probably expanded support since the initial
| announcement
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Only in the Beta Android app for now... Signal is around
| for what, a decade now? And they still can't (or rather,
| refuse to) do the basic "copy the SQLite DB file to a
| folder". Edit: and even this beta feature is some
| bullshit proprietary thing with their own cloud and
| subscription rather than simply "let me export the DB
| file and stick it in a cloud provider of my choice".
|
| Last time I had to reinstall my phone I ended up finding
| an implementation of their phone-to-phone transfer
| protocol to emulate a "new" device I'm transferring to
| just to get a dump of the data (I'd share, but don't want
| them to close this option, since clearly the lack of
| export option is very much intentional).
|
| Then I deleted Signal and begrudgingly moved to WhatsApp
| (in addition to iMessage which I've already been using).
| abraham wrote:
| Signal has had a backup to a file you can do any you want
| to for years.
| newscracker wrote:
| Never on iOS or any other Apple platform. Signal is
| designed not to be able to backup to iCloud either. The
| only option iOS users have had over the last few years is
| to do a device to device transfer where both phones are
| expected to be in physical proximity and it takes hours
| to transfer the data. Lost phone has meant losing all
| chats.
|
| WhatsApp, which is infamous by association with Meta,
| backs up to Google Drive or wherever.
| encom wrote:
| My biggest problem with Signal is their desktop app is
| awful. Telegram, for all its faults, has an excellent
| desktop app.
|
| I hate writing on a phone - anything longer than a few
| words I use my computer for.
| joecool1029 wrote:
| > Telegram, for all its faults, has an excellent desktop
| app.
|
| Their developers are also very responsive to PR's, I have
| a couple GCC build fixes in it.
|
| I really soured on Signal early with when running BB10,
| they would not let us fork and use/distribute websocket
| builds to get around not having google play services on
| available on that platform: https://github.com/libresigna
| l/libresignal/issues/37#issueco...
|
| I'm still a little sour on it now because there's still
| no way to transfer the identity since they refuse
| itunes/icloud backup, refuse any way to export a key, and
| I have to look at hideous corporate memphis icons every
| time I set up Signal new again on iOS (at least Android
| doesn't have the last thing).
|
| I mentioned before, but I use mautrix-signal to be able
| to have a unified (except for telegram) messenger on
| desktop with nheko or element via matrix. It works really
| well.
| abenga wrote:
| In some countries, Whatsapp is pretty much the de facto
| town square. Friend groups, family groups, event planning,
| customer support for businesses (though now it's just
| talking to shitty AI bots), all on WhatsApp. You can't beat
| the network effects any more. One understands why Meta paid
| 19b for it.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| > And you can't even implement it yourself because it requires
| special permissions on Android
|
| That depends on your carrier, which is even worse. There are
| several ways to activate RCS for a phone number, as this
| standard is meant for carriers rather than app developers, and
| the carrier gets to choose which one they want.
|
| I think the reference implementation died around the time
| carriers shut down their RCS servers because nobody was using
| them. https://github.com/Hirohumi/rust-rcs-client seems to be
| the most reason open RCS client at the moment (with an Android
| demo app).
|
| The real need and opportunity for an RCS messenger is on the
| LineageOS/custom ROM scene, where these permissions are
| available (you can sign the ROM yourself, after all).
|
| As for the Google stuff, RCS being routed through Google is an
| anomaly that will hopefully be fixed as carriers add support to
| it so native Android <-> iOS messaging isn't completely
| terrible. Progress has been slow outside of countries that
| still use SMS (like the USA) but eventually we'll be back to
| normal carrier-based carrier message exchange once things calm
| down a bit.
|
| On the Android side of things, I don't expect things to change
| soon, as most of the restricted fields were at one point
| available to developers and were mostly used to stalk users
| across installs without their knowledge for tracking and
| "telemetry" purposes. A country where people actually use
| SMS/RCS will have to crack down on Google's lack of an RCS API.
| Groxx wrote:
| The problem with all these problems is that it makes RCS
| _noticeably_ worse in both normal use and for your privacy
| than a regular web chat via some other system. And I do not
| see a path for it that escapes that.
|
| I'm very happy that they're essentially using MLS, that's a
| real benefit[1]. But other chat apps can (and some do) do
| that too, without actively driving _every single carrier
| globally_ to give Google _all of your messaging activity_. We
| 're better off having diversity.
|
| This all _could_ reverse course and become acceptable, but I
| don 't see how it would happen in practice. It seems much
| more likely that everyone will just give up and say "yeah
| that didn't work".
|
| 1: Though without alternate impls they can just silently MITM
| it and how would you know? RCS users: have you _ever_
| verified your messaging keys out of band? Do you know how? I
| can 't find it in Messages. The "Universal Profile
| https://www.gsma.com/solutions-and-
| impact/technologies/netwo..." for RCS that describes a ton of
| things compliant apps have to do (many of which Google
| Messages does not seem to do, as far as I can tell) has _no
| instructions at all_ to show users their keys or provide a
| common way to verify them (as far as I can tell). Client
| diversity provides a way to detect _some_ attacks here, but
| there is currently _almost no client diversity_ , and instead
| it seems to be shrinking towards just Google Messages, using
| Google's servers.
| Groxx wrote:
| As a follow-up, since I can't edit any more:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45980788
|
| ^ They are correct, the MLS / E2EE part of RCS is quite new
| and not yet implemented ~anywhere. So it gets no points
| until widespread, and this is now _a decade_ after RCS 's
| introduction. I think we can expect it to take a long time
| yet, if at all.
| WhyNotHugo wrote:
| > eventually we'll be back to normal carrier-based carrier
| message
|
| Why would you want to go into this closed model, where you'll
| likely be charged per-account? How is this any better than
| XMPP, email, or any other IM protocol out there?
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Because it's a universal lowest-common-denominator and
| generally included in the plan you pay anyway for data
| access.
|
| Should you use it for day-to-day messaging? No. But having
| it for emergencies is nice - if anything, just to bootstrap
| an alternative, secure channel.
| Telaneo wrote:
| Then why not use SMS?
| decimalenough wrote:
| Because SMS is horribly limited. 140 chars per message*
| (less if chars are not plain vanilla ASCII), no support
| for attachments, group messages, reliable delivery
| receipts, emoji reactions, etc etc.
|
| * There's a terrible hack called concatenated SMS that
| strings together multiple messages to build one longer
| message under the hood, but if any of those parts go
| missing along the way, the whole thing gets dropped on
| the floor.
| Telaneo wrote:
| For the proposed use case, you don't need those things,
| except maybe the 140 character thing, but I've never
| found that limiting, since phones stitch them together
| nowadays (and have for the past 15 years?).
|
| Sure, RCS has those functions, but half of them are
| broken 60% of the time, and you don't need those anyway
| for bootstraping into wherever you actually want to talk,
| and for short messaging.
|
| RCS brings nothing to the table if all you need is to
| tell mum she needs to come pick you up. On the contrary,
| it might fail you because it tried and failed to send
| that message over a 4G connection you barely have, rather
| than sending it as an SMS and then actually arriving. And
| you're never going to use it for group messages,
| attachments or with emojis unless its an actual service
| you intend to use for serious purposes, which is exactly
| what the comment I was responding to said you weren't
| going to use RCS for anyway.
|
| I disabled RCS (and iMessage back when I had an iPhone)
| for exactly these reasons, but still use SMS as a
| fallback with people I don't actually know and never
| intend to talk to again, and see no reason to upgrade to
| RCS even if it wasn't broken, since for my use cases, the
| extra feature set isn't needed. If I need more fancy
| features, its for use with people I actually know, and
| thus people I can get in touch with on not-SMS.
| bxrt wrote:
| It doesn't change your point, but SMS is limited to 160
| chars per message. Twitter was originally limited to 140.
| dangus wrote:
| My novice read of it is that Google made the mistake of trying
| to hand off the management burden to carriers, since they felt
| that the way to make something universal like SMS/MMS is to
| include carrier support.
|
| But that obviously didn't work because there are hundreds
| (thousands?) of cellular carriers around the world and they are
| the wrong people to manage such a thing.
|
| So they basically are steering it back to "Google's shitty
| iMessage."
|
| The universal thing isn't the carrier anymore, the universal
| thing is the Internet that runs on top of it, which is perhaps
| why just about everyone outside the US tends to use messaging
| apps like WhatsApp/Signal/WeChat/etc.
| projektfu wrote:
| Every time I have gotten a SIM card in a country south of the
| US-Mexico border, the carrier spams the text messaging. But
| nobody else uses it.
|
| In the US we don't reliably use WhatsApp, iMessage is locked
| down, and Signal, etc., are just for tech bros or political
| hacks. Yet, everyone wants to text instead of call, so we are
| in this world where we need to make RCS work, and they are
| just not putting in the effort.
| dangus wrote:
| You might be surprised at how many "normies" are getting on
| board with Signal.
|
| The user base pales in comparison to WhatsApp but it did
| double in the last couple of years.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| If you're not a nerd, signal is like a batlight for
| people doing stupid shit.
| pjc50 wrote:
| It turns out that the only thing worse than the platform
| monopolist was the old phone carries monopolies.
|
| > just about everyone outside the US tends to use messaging
| apps like WhatsApp/Signal/WeChat/etc.
|
| This is The Way. Well, several ways, since you inevitably end
| up a bit fragmented, but usually a country will settle on
| one, usually WhatsApp. Further east Telegram is also popular.
| SebastianKra wrote:
| ...and then WhatsApp starts to send ads in push-
| notifications that you can't turn off. And you either have
| to live with it, or be a massive black hole in your friends
| communities.
|
| I don't know if RCS is _the way_ , but monopolistic
| messaging apps definitely aren't.
|
| https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/474179/how-do-i-
| di...
| philsnow wrote:
| > and then WhatsApp starts to send ads in push-
| notifications that you can't turn off
|
| *that you can't _filter_.
|
| Every time an app begs me to enable notifications, I give
| it the side-eye because I immediately assume it's going
| to include notifications that I don't want to see, which
| are essentially ads for some app feature / some part of
| their walled garden.
|
| I want to be able to filter notifications at the OS
| level. That could be by a substring search on the content
| of the notification, or by a unique-per-call-site (in the
| code) identifier included in the API the app uses to
| surface a notification (though I suspect most apps would
| just re-use the same identifier everywhere because the
| developers don't _want_ me to be able to filter their
| ads).
| binkHN wrote:
| Yeah. I'm as frustrated as you are. I had an app in the app
| store even with all the restrictions around SMS, but there's
| simply no way to integrate with RCS, so this is basically
| Google's iMessage.
| aki237 wrote:
| +1. I was a strong proponent of RCS earlier. Don't care about
| Green/Blue bubble nonsense. But Google (an Ad company) started
| abusing RCS to send garbage ads my way. And there is no way to
| block that as well except for disabling RCS. I feel this is a
| loophole Google can abuse where local regulations ban vendors
| for sending promotional messages.
|
| Whatever it is, Google of all org should not be at the Helm of
| this.
|
| And the amount of moral policing they did to apple. Disgusting
| assholes. I hate Apple for a lot of reasons. iMessage is
| definitely not one of them.
| fidotron wrote:
| The only Google product that people will not ultimately
| regret adopting is golang, and even that is debatable.
| joecool1029 wrote:
| I know this is a niche complaint but I hate packaging
| golang things. On Gentoo contributors are stuck hosting
| giant dependency tarballs since you need the modules to
| build a package and we sandbox networking while building.
| kenhwang wrote:
| I definitely think people will regret adopting Golang in
| time. It's this generation's Java, except without an smooth
| off-ramp in Kotlin/Scala and even less of the benefits.
| juliangmp wrote:
| I've never heard of RCS until this day, and honestly... what's
| the point of it? Why would you even touch your phones "vanilla"
| messaging app? I know Americans go feral and will try to murder
| you if you don't use iMessage or whatever, but I never understood
| why.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Not having to rely on the good intentions of Signal or the
| corporate interests of WhatsApp/Line/WeChat/Telegram/etc. is a
| good reason in my book. There's no proof of bad intentions, but
| if I were the NSA/CIA, I'd set up a service like Signal,
| tweaked to encrypt in such a way that only I can decrypt its
| messages.
|
| SMS/MMS is simply terrible to use, but at least it follows the
| normal "my carrier sends messages to your carrier" approach.
| The alternative "my carrier sends messages to Facebook to send
| messages to your carrier" flow adds an unnecessary middle-man,
| most of which will sell your data.
| thyristan wrote:
| SMS and MMS followed that flow, yes.
|
| But since all the networks since 4G, there is no more low-
| level network support for things like SMS. Everything,
| including voice and messages, is IP- and packet-based. So the
| only thing the carrier does anymore is to authenticate that
| IP connection through your SIM card and bind your identity to
| the phone number. It actually doesn't really matter if
| messages are "network native" or through a third-party app,
| there is no more guaranteed timeslot and reliable delivery
| that SMS used to have.
|
| And nowadays, RCS is also outsourced to Google by basically
| every carrier.
|
| So RCS is the same as WhatsApp et al., only that the app you
| are using doesn't tell you that Google will monitor all your
| communications in addition to the monitoring your carrier
| does...
| zamadatix wrote:
| It doesn't really matter what the encapsulation is/was, the
| values of a federated protocol the carrier participates in
| directly remain the same. The downside is you bundle the
| privacy to your carrier but that concern should really be
| solved with E2EE, not trust in a given provider. The upside
| is your communication service status is tied to your
| connection service status, and federated out immediately
| from there. You also gain the ability to fallback
| transparently to SMS/MMS in the exact same way RCS would
| work.
|
| Google botched up RCS a bit in order to get it momentum,
| but plenty of carriers do support RCS natively as that's
| the only way Apple did it with iOS. Google did at least
| push E2EE options, but those only landed in GSM with RCS
| Universal Profile 3.0 and I don't think Apple has given a
| date for when they will support that profile on iOS. That
| is to say, the problems here are not inherent to RCS itself
| but the typical adoption and rollout problems of
| communication protocols.
|
| All that aside, I'd gladly sacrifice the federated service
| provider flow if there were actually an equally popular
| federated solution to latch on to with full fallback
| capability to aid the remaining transition (+ the protocol
| actually be designed with radio power saving in mind). It's
| just RCS is by far the closest thing to that full package
| vs any other generic data messaging service.
| Y-bar wrote:
| > Google did at least push E2EE options, but those only
| landed in GSM with RCS Universal Profile 3.0 and I don't
| think Apple has given a date
|
| This is my guess also. It was published in March[1] this
| year and I think it was too late to include in this
| year's iOS 26 release, so possibly iOS 27.
|
| They have promised to implement it:
|
| > "End-to-end encryption is a powerful privacy and
| security technology that iMessage has supported since the
| beginning, and now we are pleased to have helped lead a
| cross industry effort to bring end-to-end encryption to
| the RCS Universal Profile published by the GSMA," said an
| Apple spokesperson. "We will add support for end-to-end
| encrypted RCS messages to iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and watchOS
| in future software updates." [2]
|
| 1 https://www.gsma.com/solutions-and-
| impact/technologies/netwo...
|
| 2 https://www.macrumors.com/2025/03/14/apple-encrypted-
| rcs-mes...
| kevincox wrote:
| So instead you rely on the good intentions of your phone
| carrier? At least there are N third party messaging options
| that compete as well as open source/decentralized ones that
| aren't just run by a single business. But I'd rather pick
| between all of the various messaging options than having
| another thing that my phone provider needs to do well.
| bashkiddie wrote:
| If I want to ask my neighbor for a cup of sugar, I can
| either send a text or whatsapp. I get to choose which
| messenger I trust more.
|
| Whatsapp provides metadata about my social profile and my
| active ours of the day to Facebook/Meta.
|
| Carrier text message available is a bonus to me.
| novia wrote:
| I have this reddit thread bookmarked for how to fix RCS every
| time I get a new phone:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/GoogleMessages/comments/1be8gxk/fix...
| globalnode wrote:
| my cheapo plan gives unlimited sms but not free data, so id
| rather just turn rcs off instead.
| tcfhgj wrote:
| I don't. RCS is probably the worst messaging option right after
| SMS.
| codedokode wrote:
| What's good in RCS? As I understand, they are cleartext, sender
| and receiver number are also cleartext and go through mobile
| telco which means they can charge for every message and the
| government can see everything. Looks like garbage technology to
| me.
|
| Also the idea that anyone can send messages to anyone without
| permission is ridiculous. Made specially for spammers and
| scammers.
|
| If phone makers want an universal message exchange standard, it
| should be encrypted and completely ignore telecoms interests.
| vertnerd wrote:
| I admit I didn't even know I was using RCS on Android until I
| switched to a cheap flip-phone and I could no longer post to a
| Wordle group chat that I had been in for years. What is the
| possible advantage _to the user_ for a messaging platform that
| ONLY works on an Android or iOS device with an active number? Don
| 't want.
| jackconsidine wrote:
| We send many thousands of delivery notifications per day on SMS
| over Twilio. I've been wanting to use RCS for a long time (better
| group notification experiences, branded identification etc).
| Tried to do so last month: you pay a fee (I think $500) to enable
| RCS with a third-party only to find out that a small percentage
| of devices have it enabled making it effectively useless. So we
| switched to WhatsApp.
| dspillett wrote:
| _> only to find out that a small percentage of devices have it
| enabled making it effectively useless._
|
| Which means a lot of people actively don't want it and have
| turned it off or not elected to turn it on when setting up a
| new phone. I got prompted to turn it on with my now S65 a while
| ago and said no (I just want basic works-everywhere simple SMS,
| thanks, for anything fancier I've got chat-app-de-jour. It got
| turned on anyway so I had to find the option and turn it back
| off.
| intothemild wrote:
| Here's a really simple solution... Apple, run your own RCS
| servers.
|
| That skips the carrier nonsense, and it also means that for
| iPhone users they're not actually running on google jibe servers.
|
| Thing is. Apple won't do this. Malicious compliance and all.
| joshstrange wrote:
| Why should they? I honestly think they would have been
| justified giving RCS the middle finger indefinitely. It's
| effectively google-owned and a shitty protocol (no e2e by
| default being top of mind).
|
| Also, the idea of wanting the carriers more involved in
| messaging is hilarious, just use one of the 10+ 100x better
| messaging platforms. The carries horribly bungled SMS/MMS and
| they ceded all control of RCS to google, why in the world would
| anyone want them involved. They barely can do their jobs as
| dumb pipes.
| Groxx wrote:
| _By spec_ E2EE (via MLS, or something extremely similar) is
| in fact the default - it 's part of the Universal Profile, at
| least as of 3.0 which I have been reading.
|
| Is Google following that with Google Messages? We have no way
| to verify! How great for everyone.
| joshstrange wrote:
| > at least as of 3.0
|
| And this is what I find so galling, it took them to version
| 3.0 to decide to do that?
|
| My quick googling shows:
|
| v1: 2016
|
| v2: 2017
|
| v3: 2025
|
| So, yes "by default" in the current year it supports it but
| no one (including google) is using 3.0 yet. Apple has
| pledged to do it in iOS 26 (currently using 2.4) and Google
| has some proprietary e2ee on top of 2.6.
|
| It's just all a mess, the furthest thing possible from an
| "open standard" (not saying anyone claimed it was, that's
| just what I would have prefered if we were trying to
| replace SMS/MMS), and hopelessly behind all other messaging
| platforms.
| Groxx wrote:
| I was curious about the adoption timeline actually, yeah
| - hadn't looked at that in detail yet. Thanks!
|
| How wonderful that they've been claiming better security
| all along too. (it may be true, sms is terrible - but
| they know many people will think E2EE or similar when
| they hear that)
| fasteo wrote:
| >>> Apple, run your own RCS servers.
|
| I believe they can't. RCS is implemented over IMS (IP
| Multimedia Subsystem), part of the mobile carrier infra and
| tightly tied to them (SIM card auth, APN settings pushed from
| the operator, etc)
|
| ... unless they become a mobile operator
| boesboes wrote:
| would have been nice to include what RCS is, never heard of it.
| Appearantly it's the successor of MMS, basically.
| ctkhn wrote:
| I think it's pretty fair to expect people on here to know what
| RCS is, it's not exactly new this year
| SirMaster wrote:
| Many of my chats keep switching back and forth between RCS and
| SMS. No idea why.
| dfawcus wrote:
| I did notice one oddity with RCS on Apple, namely that initially
| it could not be enabled if the device was in Lockdown Mode. In
| one of the recent updates, 18.x for some lowish value of x, that
| was fixed, and so my iPhone now has RCS enabled.
|
| However, I found that Apple have screwed another part of Lockdown
| Mode as of 18.7.2.
|
| If a website makes use of Javascript, and is viewed in Safari
| then the page reloads a couple of times then crashes with no
| content but an error message. That can generally be fixed by
| turning off Javascript in Settings, or by turning off Lockdown
| mode for that specific web page - rather defeating its purpose.
| debo_ wrote:
| Too bad. You get AI instead.
| Joshua-Peter wrote:
| Honestly, all I want is reliable RCS messaging that just works--
| no extra setup, no bugs, just smooth texting like it should be.
| nshireman wrote:
| LLM comment spam
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| RCS was doomed from the start by virtue of the carriers playing
| any kind of role beyond acting as dumb pipes. Any standard that
| the carriers have their fingers in will be doomed to the same
| fate.
|
| It's one of the main reasons why WhatsApp, iMessage, etc have
| such popularity. A cell connection is merely one of many means of
| access and carriers have no structural role whatsoever, meaning
| that if you've got cell data you've got messaging.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Yeah it's kind of wild how many Americans want to regress to
| the bad old days of SMS. WhatsApp is just so much better. At
| least it has been for the last decade. Maybe Meta will ruin it
| soon but if that happens we can all move to Signal (until they
| ruin it). Either way it's better than giving an ounce of power
| back to telcos.
| tylergetsay wrote:
| Without the carriers RCS wouldn't have been rolled out. it's
| why the builtin carrier texting apps support RCS.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| I guess what I'm getting at is that there should've been
| standardization around a fully web-based protocol that does
| not involve the carriers in any way.
|
| Like imagine if instead of investing in RCS, Google instead
| created a web-based "Advanced Messaging Protocol" or
| something to that effect, which specifies capabilities
| roughly in line with those of RCS. The big guys like Google,
| Apple, Meta, and MS would run their own servers, but there'd
| be no reason why smaller players like FastMail and Proton
| couldn't also run them. Most users would just roll with the
| major providers pre-configured on their platform of choice
| but more savvy users could choose their own.
|
| That could've rolled out and been adopted and iterated upon
| far more quickly than RCS has.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| Exactly. There's absolutely no reason why I should even
| need a phone number in 2025. All person-to-person
| communication (text, call, video, file transfer, etc)
| should just be an open standard running on TCP.
| socratics wrote:
| I hope one day that Matrix becomes this, but it doesn't
| seem likely. Fingers crossed Proton at least does it one
| day.
| aimor wrote:
| Do you mean my message inbox isn't supposed to look like this?
| https://i.ibb.co/mFhdGkbH/Samsung-Google-Android-Messages.jp...
|
| This has been a problem (for others) for years and apparently
| nobody knows why or how to fix it. So go through a checklist of
| disabling, uninstalling, clearing, removing, inserting,
| restarting, updating, toggling, calling, waiting, praying.
| dz0ny wrote:
| Btw Google also stopped providing RCS proxy or whatever that was
| for small mobile providers. Message in settings will just say RCS
| is not supported, funnily that also breaks Gemini in Messages
| app, with infinite spinner.
| msh wrote:
| I hate sms/mms/rcs. Ideally from my point of view imode email
| would have been the ideal cross platform solution.
| nicholashead wrote:
| I am going through something very similar. My entire family is on
| the same T-Mobile plan, and on recent iPhones - however, my
| wife's phone is the only one where RCS fails to work over Wi-Fi
| (only works over cellular). I've reset her network settings
| completely, no dice. T-Mobile support is worthless on this and
| basically just offered to recreate her eSim (didn't work). Apple
| said I need to talk to T-Mobile, not them. When she's off Wi-Fi,
| it seems to work. I honestly have no idea what could be broken
| here.
| johndoh42 wrote:
| I just want an option to opt-out of that flaming broken pile of
| spam fire that RCS is.
| yapyap wrote:
| Well for your sake I am happy the Windows phone is dead if you
| had to carry it otherwise
| nerdjon wrote:
| I got so angry that I turned off RCS on my iPhone after I was
| somewhere with limited service, I was sending messages and they
| were being seriously delayed. Friends were trying to reach me and
| the same was happening. I finally broke down and got out of the
| group chat I was in and messaged the friend in the group chat
| that had iMessage and things worked great (still spotty but at
| least I did not think that things were working when they were
| not).
|
| I don't know or frankly care where the problem is but it has made
| me swear off RCS completely. iMessage works and SMS gets the job
| done when I can't use iMessage.
|
| I know why Google is pushing RCS so hard, but that alone should
| be concerning.
| lxgr wrote:
| And I just want actual interoperable, Internet standards based
| messaging.
|
| In both aspects, RCS is at most cosplaying, to say nothing of
| using phone numbers as the primary identifier.
|
| I'll gladly welcome any blunder by its proponents, as it gives
| more people the chance to realize this.
| singpolyma3 wrote:
| I had hopes for RCS but with Google's stranglehold its basically
| just another silo and not at all like SMS and MMs have been.
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